As our motorized freighter canoe skimmed across the choppy waters of Wallace Lake, on the southern tip of Manitoba's South Atikaki Provincial Park, Prof. William O. Pruitt, Jr. waved his arm across the gunwale at the thick stands of conifers just back of the shoreline.

"There's at least a hundred years of work left to do," said the late boreal ecologist and zoologist at the University of Manitoba in response to my question about how much more research was needed to fully understand the boreal forest —...